COUPLE'S VALENTINE: 70 YEARS AS ONE

So much for the cards, the chocolates and all of the trappings that come with store-bought displays of affection. This is a Valentine's Day story with a much simpler tug at the heart.

It is about two people, both around 90, who have never celebrated this day that much differently than any other day they've lived through together.

In June, they will have been married 70 years.

"Do we get a medal?" Mark Bayuk asks, having proudly recited their statistic.

"I think we need one," adds his wife, Mary. Both of them laugh.

"He's funny," she explains, her eyes surveying the man resting in his recliner. "Maybe that's why I've put up with him for so long."

There is a knock at the door of their tidy and cheerful apartment, a small space on the second floor of an assisted-living center for the elderly in Prospect Heights.

"We're still here," Mark calls out, and in walks an aide, smiling. As she offers Mary her morning medicine, Mark jumps to his feet to get his wife something to drink.

"We're used to each other," explains Mark, 91.

"Too used to each other," says Mary, 89.

How did this begin?

"Well . . ." Mary offers. They look at one another, thinking. Suddenly, it is the 1920s and, having graduated high school, both are working jobs in a small Minnesota town.

"He was a bakery truck driver, and that day, he was making a delivery."

"She was in there on her coffee break."

"We were both kind of curious," Mary explains.

"Then!" Mark adds with the stab of a finger, "she made an effort to be in there every day for coffee at just the time I was to make my delivery. At least that's the way it looked to me."

"Definitely," Mary says.

"All the other guys in town were pretty sore at me because she was really beautiful."

"He had more hair then," Mary explains.

They married in 1926.

A year later, they moved to Chicago with the simple dream of starting a family. For a while, at least, tomorrow had its promise: Mary stayed home to raise their two boys while Mark brought home a good dollar from his job driving passengers to and from the city's rail stations.

Then came the Great Depression.

"I'll never forget, it was her birthday," Mark explains. "I came home and I had to tell her that I had been laid off. They said, `You have no job,' and I said, `But I have a family.' "

And so, like others whose lives were shaped by the contours of that struggle, they put their hopes on hold and worried about more pressing concerns like how to survive with two small children.

"Our biggest fights at that time were how we were going to get the money to eat," Mary recalls.

Eventually, times changed for the better. Both found steady work.

And what got them through, they say, are the simple things that have always defined their relationship: companionship; being there for the children; togetherness, even when too much of it wears on the nerves.

"I often wonder how they've stayed together for so long without killing each other," quips their son, William, 67, who lives in Schaumburg. His brother, Gerald, is in Madison, Wis. "Growing up, I always remember them as very caring and always there for me and my brother."

His mother laughs when she hears the first part. "Well, you do get tired of each other. Sometimes it's an effort."

They retired to Florida and took their one big vacation to Hawaii.

"We were pretty proud because we were able to get around and find places on our own," Mark says.

But age would intrude on independence.

Last summer, Mary fell and broke her hip. Her time in the hospital was the only time that she and her husband had ever really been apart.

They gave away most of their possessions and moved into assisted-living here, bringing them closer to a family that includes eight grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. Mary, who now needs a walker, says she likes it. Mark, who misses the car he drove in Florida, is not so sure.

"There are so many old people here," he laments.

Not big on organized activities, they mostly keep to themselves inside an apartment where there is comfort in the familiar, but both confess the space sometimes feels so very small.

"We argue about what day it is. No kidding," says Mark, going to the top of a television set, which during the summer is always on for Cubs games. He retrieves the calendar where he tries to remember to mark each day off with a big "X."

"We were family-devoted," Mark says.

"We raised two good boys," Mary agrees.

And, yes, there is a Valentine's Day message to be found in the sharing of so many years.

"Well, you have to like each other," Mark says.

"And you have to argue. I holler at him and he hollers at me," Mary adds. "I holler at him plenty."

"That she does," Mark says, nodding in agreement. "And not a day goes by that I don't say, `Well, you'll see when I'm gone.' "